~ Researching Russell Co, Kentucky

Category Archives: Microsoft Word

My husband has been talking about potentially organizing a family reunion and I have been thinking about ways to show the family research that I’ve done without pulling out the traditional family group sheets and 5 gen charts. I thought I would try to create a type of tribute page for each family in his tree, almost in the style of an obituary. I highly recommend trying to write an obituary for your ancestors – it helped me to think through my ancestor’s life to see if I had additional areas to research and to help me make a research plan for other members of the family.

I plan to include maps to show the area each family is from as well as images that show interesting aspects of their lives. For example, Andrew Dabelstein was born and married in Germany, but was a bricklayer and hod carrier in Chicago after they came to the United States. I included an image showing bricklayers in the Chicago area during that era.

I have many ideas of items that I’d like to include, so this may turn into a pamphlet of
sorts, but I’m still playing with it. Here’s my first attempt at the front page of Andrew Dabelstein’s tribute. I’m also including the text for the obit/tribute that I wrote for Andrew in case another descendent visits the blog. If that’s the case, I’d love to hear from you!

Andrew J. Dabelstein

Hans Hinrich Detlev Dabelstein (1816-1891) was a day laborer in the tiny village of Nusse, Lubeck, about 15 miles from the Baltic Sea. In 1847, Hans married Maria Dorothea Niemann (1822-1896) and they started a family.

Jochim Andreas “Andrew” Dabelstein was the third child of Hinrich and Dorothea. He and his older siblings, Dorothea and Hinrich, would eventually welcome 2 additional siblings, Maria and Margaretha, to the family.

At the age of 26, Andrew married Sophia Catharina Christina “Alvina” Carstens in the city of Hamburg, Germany on Mar. 20, 1879. Alvina was the daughter of Johann Hinrich Carstens and Magdalena Margareta Voss.

Andrew and Alvina lived in Hamburg where Andrew was a laborer. They had their oldest child, Fritz Carl Hans Johann “John” Dabelstein on Dec. 27, 1880 in Hamburg.

On Apr. 19, 1882, “Andr”, “Christine” and “Fritz” left their families behind to began a two-week journey traveling in steerage from Hamburg to New York aboard the Wieland. By January, they had settled in Chicago where Andrew worked as a brick layer and hod carrier. Very soon, they expanded their family, eventually having 5 children: John, Martha, Minnie, William and Andrew.

Andrew and Alvina lived in Chicago for many years. Alvina passed away at the age of 54 on May 27, 1912. She died from heart failure due to overexertion. She was preceded in death by her son, John, who passed away in 1903 at the age of 22.

Andrew passed away at the age of 76 on Nov. 23, 1929 after living with his daughter Minnie Danker’s family for the final 2 years of his life.

I have been finding so much great information for the family I am currently researching that I have not taken the time to finish the video I put together for using the bottom half of the Family Group Sheet. But I made that a priority today and now it’s ready!

Every family that we research has a different puzzle to be solved. Who were the parents? Have I found all of the siblings? Was the person who witnessed that deed related in some way?

Because every family is different, doesn’t it make sense that customizing each Family Group Sheet would be helpful? Sometimes, I’d like to have information for more than just a couple and their children. I wasn’t able to make the changes that I wanted to with the current format of the Family Group Sheet that I had originally created. To help with this, I’ve created an updated version of the half-sheet FGS and it is now available in the “Downloads” tab at the top of the screen. I’m deleting the old version as this new version looks exactly the same, but has more flexibility than the original version did.

I have 3 specific families that I have been working on recently that I am using the “Amped-Up” FGS to help me with. The video will show you what I did to keep track of all of the pieces for these puzzles.

For the first family, both the husband and his wife were born in Europe and met after arriving in the US. I wanted to add cells to their Family Group Sheet to keep track of any information I had found related to their immigration. When I attempted to add those cells to the group sheet, the formatting was not behaving the way that I wanted. With the updated FGS, I am able to add as many cells as I’d like to the form.

The second family puzzle was a little more detailed. I have been trying to find all of the children of James Conn Sr, who was born in 1751. He did not leave a will, but I know that the land was passed on to his children based on various deeds that I have found after James’ death. Some children indicated that they were selling their 1/11th share of the land. Some grandchildren indicated that land they were selling had been passed on to them from their parents and James Conn’s original patent was mentioned in the deed. I’m attempting to find all of James’ children to see if anything in their records would tell me the name of James’ wife. In order to prove who the children were, I wanted to search for any deed records for James’ children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren. I did not want to create group sheets for every great-grandchild, but I wanted a way to keep the lists of names managable. I have found a way to do that using my updated FGS.

For the third family, I am attempting to solve the mystery of a previously unknown sister from Kansas. I wanted a way to keep the information for 3 generations of the family all on one FGS so that I would know where to be looking for records and in what time period.

Remember, the updated half-sheet FGS is available in the “Downloads” tab at the top of the blog. That is the base for the techniques that I’ll be sharing in today’s video tutorial. Maybe this video will help you think of some ways to customize your own group sheet. If it does, I’d love to hear from you!

As I’ve been working with my own Family Land Sheets, I’ve been amazed at the number of documents that I can tie into my sheet. Not just deeds, but transcriptions, court records, marriage records, probate records, and even group sheets and maps. And it doesn’t matter how organized I am with my file naming or folder organization, sometimes, it just takes time to drill down to the correct folder to open a file to double check exactly what it said. That’s where hyperlinks come in. Once you’ve hyperlinked a document to some specific text or image in the Land Sheet, it only takes a single click to open the document or web page.

In this video, I’ve shown how to add hyperlinking within the body of the document, in the endnotes and in the comments. I also show how to add a hyperlink with your email address if you want to share your document with other researchers as well as how to add a bookmark so you can add a hyperlink to jump to a specific place within the document.

I’m only planning one more video using the Family Land Sheet as an illustration. After that, I’ve got some ways to use Excel coming up!

I have to admit, this is one of the videos for using Microsoft Word that I’ve been most excited to create! I see so many applications for using comments and endnotes in my research process that help me figure out my research puzzles and I couldn’t wait to share!

I’ll be the first to tell you that my brain is not what it used to be! I tell my husband that it’s because my brain is so packed with important information there’s just no room for anything else! But with our busy day-to-day schedules, I don’t always have the time to devote to genealogy that I’d like. Being able to add comments – what was I thinking here, why does this name sound familiar, what record was I going to follow up with next – is a necessity if I want to avoid always having to retrace my steps to figure out where I left off last.

But just having a monster list of comments isn’t as helpful as it could be. In this video, I show how to categorize comments and how to hide certain categories so that only specific comments are showing at a time.

I also use endnotes quite a bit – but not just for citations. For a project like this, when I’m not certain which records apply to my ancestor, I use them to remind myself of relationships or dates or other tidbits of information that can help me prove that a person is related to me and how that relationship branches to me.

This video is longer than I was hoping it would be. Around 20 minutes. But the topics are so interrelated, I didn’t want to split it into 2 videos. The features covered in this video are a little more advanced so I hope you’ll learn something new when you watch!

We’ve been building a “Family Land Sheet” in order to collect and analyze information from a lifetime of land transactions for an ancestor. I wanted a form that would be similar to a Family Group Sheet so that I can be certain that I’ve collected all of the clues from each transaction that same way that a Group Sheet collects clues from the children.

This time, I want to show you 4 different ways to use color within your FLS to help you analyze the information that you have collected and to see patterns at a glance.

I had originally planned to do one video covering adding color, comments and citations, but I want to keep these videos short, so the new plan is to make 2 shorter videos to cover all three concepts. I hope you enjoy it and find it helpful in your research!

In my last post, I created a video to show how to use Microsoft Word to create your own Family Land Sheet. The great thing about creating your own forms is being able to include the information that YOU think will be most helpful in your research. The FLS is my own personal research buddy that helps me see patterns that I probably wouldn’t see just by reading and even transcribing documents and it remembers everything for me because my brain sure isn’t what it used to be!

As I begin to enter information into the FLS, I’ve stated that the goal is to collect information from every land transaction involving any John Smith in Mercer County. Then, I’ll analyze the information to see if I can determine a way to tell different men with the same name apart.

Once again, I’ve created a video showing all of the steps involved in getting information into the form as well as ways to make the information as readable as possible. In the video, I use an Alt code to enter a £ and I mentioned that I’d include a link to other Alt codes in the blog, so here it is!

Introducing – Video Tutorials! (Or download the form here to save time of creating your own!)

Yesterday, I wrote about why I decided to create a new form to track a lifetime of land transactions for my ancestors. Digging deep into the lives of our ancestors often means looking at land deeds. Deeds can help us determine family relationships

and the names of neighbors.

If an ancestor is selling his land, the wife’s name is usually included in the deed.

Dates of deeds can tell us when a person has died or moved away from an area. Clues in deeds can also help us distinguish between men with identical names.

But sometimes, reading those deeds can get confusing, especially if your ancestor had a lot of land transactions or if the land was described with metes and bounds.

For all those reasons, I decided that I wanted a form that is similar to a Family Group Sheet, but to have the focus be on all of the land records instead of all of the children. So I created a “Family Land Sheet” to help me organize my information and to help me look for clues that are so easy to overlook.

You can download my Family Land Sheet here, or keep reading and learn more about using features in Microsoft Word to create your own version!

Today, I’d like to show you how to create your own Family Land Sheet in Microsoft Word. I started trying to type out the instructions, but it was getting rather lengthy, so instead, I decided to try my hand at creating a video.

I have been thinking for quite awhile about making a series of videos on how to use Word and Excel, but I kept getting tripped up by thinking of what to show in each video and how many videos to create. I know that some people would have very little experience and would like to see “beginner steps” and others would be bored with seeing videos showing basic skills. So I’ve decided that I will show how to create specific items within Word (Excel examples are coming as well) and over time, a variety of skills will be covered.

I’ve created a YouTube channel and I plan to add videos there as well as embedding them within my blog. I’ve added a page to the blog (see the top tabs) that will keep all of the videos without the extra blog text. This is an evolving plan, so I don’t want to over promise, but I am excited to build a “library” of videos geared specifically to genealogists for you to watch whenever you’d like. I hope you find it helpful!

I’m continuing in my never-ending quest to find information on my ancestor, John Smith. One of his great-grandsons had a short biography which indicated that John was an early settler of Danville, Kentucky so I’ve been trying to find the “missing link” to find John’s parents and to prove a jump from the Danville area to Russell County.

When working in pre-1850 time period, land records and tax records become your best friend. However, when looking at the tax records for the times, I see FIVE different men named John Smith! In order to attempt to tell these 5 men apart, I am turning to land records.

I always feel like I am missing something when I read multiple deeds. They are often quite long and the metes and bounds descriptions tend to make my eyes cross! But the records are so important, I felt that I HAD to find a way to see all of the information in one snapshot. I thought about how a Family Group Sheet gives you all of the basic information for each member of the family and based on that, decided to modify a family group sheet specifically to show information on all of the land transactions for a specific person. I’ve decided to call it a Family Land Sheet.

My idea was that each part of a group sheet would have an equal partner on the land sheet.

Child’s name = County and Book, Birth becomes Date of land purchase with the name of seller, Death becomes Date of land sale with the name of buyer, Marriage becomes witnesses and people mentioned in the deed (neighbors).

I decided to shorten the top section so that I only have names and birth-death information. And I decided I would like to have a column for the number of acres and amount paid as well as a column for comments.

Here’s the top of my Group Sheet

And the top of my Land Sheet.

So now I’m beginning to go through the deeds that I have scanned and filling in the information and even though I’m just getting started, I can see that it is going to be a tremendous help.

Have you ever noticed that when you have a TON of potential information – or when you are trying to distinguish between many men with the same name, as you are looking through the information, you almost ALWAYS wish you’d taken better notes? You see something and you think “haven’t I seen someone else living on this creek?” or “why is that name so familiar?” Frustrating!

So I’ve been looking through land grants for John Smith (of course). And as everyone knows, there is a John Smith under every rock in every county ever created. Or at least it seems that way. I’m also looking for the land grants for the names that are showing up on tax lists under the “Entered”, “Surveyed” and “Patented” columns. I plan to follow the chain of possession on the land in order to look for connections in FANs to try to distinguish “my” John Smith from the others.

So I created a form using Word to help me jot down things as I’m looking through these grants. I wanted a form where I could jot down the basic information and then know exactly where to look if I need to go back. Additional information can be added to the form if I decide to follow up later. If I think it’s worthy of researching further, I’ll fill in the information using Word and file it in the appropriate online folder.

I wanted a form that would be easy to organize into groups or rearrange into chronological order. So my form is a half sheet that helps me remember what types of information to look for. If I think it would be helpful, I have an area to add a digital image to – intended for the drawings of the survey map often included on the survey document. I can take additional notes on the back if I find additional deeds or other documents to tie people together.

I plan to print out a supply of these forms to have nearby as I go through the grants. Feel free to download the form here if you think it would be helpful in your research.

p.s. Thanks to those of you who have been emailing me about my broken finger! I no longer have to wear the hand brace (just two fingers taped together), which means that typing is now possible, although slower than regular. But I’m happy to be back at my keyboard again!